Perhaps it's just the fallibility of my own memory, but looking at the No Doubt and Beastie Boys videos linked I don't recall them looking terribly different to what they do now.
It'd be great to have a side by side comparison, or perhaps some information on which ones they're going to work on so I can grab them now and do it myself later.
Often times, even professionals working with older, standard-definition video end up processing it incorrectly, or may be working with digitizations in which someone else already made an error. Interlacing is almost never handled by a "double framerate" method (in which a 30fps interlaced video, each frame consisting of two 60Hz fields, is transformed into a 60fps progressive video). As well, often times such video is even captured with every other field missing (more common in VHS captures than professionally-handled captures, but that's a slight digression).
Also, SD video really does look best on an SD CRT display. Often times, the upscaling to HD, as well as the differing visual properties of typical HD displays, will cause the inherent flaws of the SD material to be more pronounced. You won't ever get a true comparison without seeing the video playing on a decent SDTV. And honestly, playing these videos on an SDTV would probably look amazing compared to what you would have seen on MTV in the 80s and 90s.
If the rationale is 80s to 90s SD broadcast reference monitor quality parity on HDR/OLED displays for the masses, this is all I want.
As it goes for new digital transfers from 16mm or 35mm sources, it's a case by case thing to me, if the production looks "cheaper" when, it was not intended to by consumed beyond SD quality, better don't go over 720p remasters or it might look weird.
By coincidence I looked at the Sabotage video a year or two ago because parts were filmed locally. Quality was horrendous, looked like a scan off VHS tape with additional compression artifacts to add insult to injury.
The new version can't compete with new content in 4k of course, but it is much better than the previous official copy.
Even though all music I have on my drives is in FLAC, I can't differ it almost always from Opus 160 kbps, which is what they're using now (but most of the stuff is reencoded from previous codecs).
Yeah I guess that most people won't be able to notice any difference except for the additional traffic needed. FLAC is probably mostly useful for "masters" you keep and re-encode to the currently best lossy audio format (opus at the moment). This way you avoid generational artifacts.
They don’t necessarily use the same codec for YouTube’s master copy and the one that you get served. From what I understand, you can upload whatever codec you want to YouTube, and presumably it gets kept in its original format, so it can be transcoded however you like for serving. Anything else doesn’t make sense. Transcoding to FLAC would make sense if you uploaded PCM to begin with.
Yeah, but 160kbit Opus is so good that it's rarely worth it to use Flac. I've done 180º phase cancellations against uncompressed on a variety of sources, and it is so close to transparent that one would have to be have some serious OCD to be unsatisfied with it, and even then could not A/B it in a blind test with better than 50% accuracy except on rare source material, and then just barely.
Opus is great but its barely worth it to skimp there when compared to HD video. Still, archive copies aren't youtube's forte. Makes sense for them, but I wouldn't convert my personal audio collection with storage so cheap.
I was responding to someone lamenting the fact that they stream in Opus instead of Flac. There is zero advantage to be gained from streaming in Flac. So why the lament? If they store archival quality, they wouldn't ever be streaming it anyway.
Furthermore, you underestimate the amount of bandwidth savings when you multiply it over millions of viewings. It really adds up. It totally makes sense for them to use Opus. They save money, and the viewer loses nothing. Shaving pennies is an effective way for a business to cut expenses. Thousands of small changes, insignificant by themselves, can have a significant impact on EBITDA.
I think a reasonable middle road, since most people won't notice or care about the difference, is to support something lossless like flac but not make it the default.
The people who really care could turn it on (perhaps at the account level), and they'd be happy, and YouTube still saves on bandwidth costs.
This is awesome, and really needs to be done. What I would really like, however, is to have a downloadable version available. The videos are not safe forever on YouTube, nor does YouTube even represent the best streaming quality on the internet.
Having good quality music videos playable on my own media server is something what I've been wanting for at least 15 years.
The excessive compression YT applies, only they can fix. It especially annoys me they take a SD definition source to mean "well surely the uploader doesn't care about the quality of this video, so lets apply the lowest quality setting to it". If you have a high quality but low resolution video you have to upsample it before uploading to get around this. But of course most SD videos on there didn't do this.
How can you download something in opus using youtube-dl? I mean downloading it in opus, not telling youtube-dl to download it in some other format and then convert it to opus. I've tried it on some of the videos and before reencoding, the audio was in vorbis which is a great format and at high bitrates not very distinguishable from opus, but still opus is better.
Download options _might_ work, but depends on what formats are available:
--prefer-free-formats
Prefer free video formats unless a
specific one is requested
If opus is provided, you could probably download it this way, but I think your best bet is the post-processing method (which of course isn't perfect):
-x, --extract-audio
Convert video files to audio-only files
(requires ffmpeg or avconv and ffprobe or avprobe)
--audio-format FORMAT
Specify audio format:
"best", "aac", "flac", "mp3", "m4a",
"opus", "vorbis", or "wav";
"best" by default; No effect without -x
to repack it (without re-encoding) in to an ogg container for playback on Android. Many talks and lectures etc. could withstand the lossy transcoding to an even lower bitrate than Youtube offers (-f 249 = ~50kbps) but space isn't that much of a concern.
I have a little Automator workflow/Quick Action on my Mac that gets the current webpage from Safari, then runs a
youtube-dl -f 140 "${@%%&*}"
on it, so save the music to my home dir as an .m4a that I can then add to iTunes (obviously, that step could be automated as well). So, I don't have to visit YouTube more than necessary. It's conveniently triggered from the Safari->Services menu.
I've checked one of the remastered videos, and not seen any better audio option.
Use this command to add a file to a Master Library ("Music", "Audiobooks", and so on, depending on the kind of track) and start play. Requires the alias of the file to open, which suggests you might want to use the AppleScript "choose file" command.
tell application "iTunes"
open (choose file)
end tell
Downloading from YouTube and having an actual good quality version is not the same thing. YouTube's compression does a really poor job compared to other platforms... which makes sense when you figure how much they have to store.
Downloading from YouTube and having an actual good quality version is not the same thing. YouTube's compression does a really poor job compared to other platforms... which makes sense when you figure how much they have to store.
Nice. I am glad they did not make things too polished. For instance, in the Beastie Boys video there are these freeze frames with artifacts that seem easy to "fix", but probably would degrade the overall experience by being too perfect: https://youtu.be/z5rRZdiu1UE?t=86
Those aren't really artifacts, at least I wouldn't call them that at this point. Maybe an artifact of the original editing process, if anything. That's just how it looked back then when a field was frozen. Being a scene in motion, using a full frame would have flickered like crazy between two different fields.
So really, there's nothing to fix. Notice that the text keyed on top of the still is at full resolution.
That one in particular has a 70s cop show vibe, so yes. But I'd like to see further quality on the rest. Fun fact, several scenes are filmed in Los Feliz, the church and rooftop of art-deco apartment building.
I wonder if that means they had the originals for all these on film in a vault somewhere, or if they used digital voodoo to do a better job interpolating from video.
I don't know the production history of the music video industry, but The Killers and Lady Gaga are from an era (early 2000s) that could have been shot digitally.
Even things that are shot digitally are often shot at a higher resolution than is used for distribution, and the music itself would have been recorded in a form much better than would be useful for TV distribution of the time.
I'm a colorist that works on a lot of music videos with more than a few VMA's under my belt.
It's not uncommon for us to deliver 1080p compressed masters (at the labels request) despite having shot and finished in 4K or even 6K.
Typically delivery specs to the label are 1080p ProRes 422HQ or DNxHD175 and an a 20mbps h.264 web "master."
Unfortunately, youtube's compression kills things that are even uploaded with enormous master quality files. I recently did a video for a major artist that was shot primarily on 35mm film (some bits were 16mm and 3.2K Alexa) but the uploaded versions look terrible despite coming from high quality files. This is due in part to the subdued, low contrast color palette and heavy grain we went with - both of which are problematic for youtubes codecs which seem to be optimized for high contrast, rich color, grain less video. In this case, even though we have gorgeous masters now - the version on YouTube is a far cry from what we've screened in theaters, festivals, and on television. And this is after conference calls with Vevo and YouTube engineers who end up just apologizing and unable to do anything about it. Frustrating.
Of course this true to some extent for every video we upload, but some are much worse than others. Vimeo does not really have this problem (or not nearly as much) for what it's worth.
There are very few good reasons to record 50fps video, but a lot of it already exists, and it would be nice to retain the ability to play it with correct frame timing. I occasionally switch my monitor to 50Hz for 50fps video.
You can kind of do that by upscaling the video to 1440p60 before uploading. Each pixel becomes exactly 3x3 pixels, unlike when going from 480p to 1080p where you have to deal with half-pixels.
So I've wondered what this remastering actually means and wanted to get a before-after comparison. Luckily, archive.org is also saving youtube videos, although not all of them and not every time. But I could find an old version of a now remastered video [1] here [2] with the raw video URL here [3]. I've downloaded the original via youtube-dl -k and got the vorbis/webm version before it got transcoded. Both are encoded as 128 kbit 44100 Hz 32 bit sampled vorbis audio with the encoder string both set to "Google", verifying that there was no transcoding in either after the download from YouTube.
The first difference you can notice is that the old version sounds kinda metallic, while the new one actually contains details.
The second difference, opening it in audacity, is that there is a slight time offset between the two versions of about 500 ms, the remastered version being "later". This of course has implications to old links that point to parts of the music video at specific offsets and in other music videos the offset could be larger.
After I've manually synced the file, and normalized both waveforms, I've made some screenshots of the waveform and fft at around 7 or 8 seconds covering the 5-6 second long part where he sings "I could lie to myself but it's true" [4]. The stereo channels of the new version are above while the old version's channels are below. You can notice that they have reversed some effects of the loudness war here: the old sample has far more dnymic compression than the new one. In the FFT plot you can see much more detail, especially in frequencies above 2kHz.
Checked out White Wedding and it sounded fantastic and looked better than I've ever seen it. Previously I never noticed the attendees at the wedding before, they were just fuzzy blobs. Now I can see they are real, cool 80s folks, haha.
Looks like the video was filmed originally. Wonder if any more quality could be squeezed out of it, the 1920 res vesion does have additional details but not a ton. This is much better than the average old video on yt, however.
I like how the new version is attached to the original database entry for the video: it still has a 2009 upload date, 65M views, and user comments, etc.
How about partnering with UMG to stop removing educational videos where UMG copy written material is clearly credited and praised, and where the content creator isn't even looking to profit from sowing UMG material, only to educate...
Copyright doesn't mean CC-BY. Attribution doesn't magically give you a redistribution license (copyrighted, btw, not copywritten). If UMG wanted to grant you a license, they would. But they don't.
Yada yada, yes copyright should have sane term limits, and yes maybe copyright is a weird idea to begin with, but that's not the issue here.
Youtube does not have a system for "fair use". If you use a few seconds of someone else's content - even for the specific purposes exempted in the copyright act like education and criticism - Youtube will still let the owner of those few seconds claim the total amount of ad revenue for the whole clip.
Fair use is essential to allowing open debate in our country, and Youtube is negligent in creating a system which does not allow for legally exempted fair uses.
There is no such thing as a "system for fair use", it's somewhat ambiguous and legally the matter is decided in courts. YouTube doesn't have the authority to systematically make decisions on this, although does have a program for creators that deal more frequently with fair use:
All bad actors (especially UMG) should be relegated to either filing DMCA removal requests which do not have an option to monetize.
If they want to collect any revenues YouTube should force them to sue individual creators in the courts. Unfortunately YouTube is rewarding the bad behavior of one of their biggest clients instead.
> If you use a few seconds of someone else's content - even for the specific purposes exempted in the copyright act like education and criticism - Youtube will still let the owner of those few seconds claim the total amount of ad revenue for the whole clip.
What if your video contains two fragments, owned by different people? And what if one of those people is you or a friend?
It certainly seems like a flawed system, I've heard some discussion about whether someone could preemptively claim their own video with a separate account to prevent a third party from also claiming. Some thought it would work, but haven't heard anyone who's actually tried it in practice.
If there's something that could drive me back to CDs or maintaining a collection of MP3s it's this. The word "remastered" on Spotify or Youtube now fills me with dread.
Stop. Please for the love of all that's good in the world, just STOP.
"Remastered" would be fine if it was just cleaning up the sound and improve the quality but it's not. So many are worse versions of the originals because someone decided to "improve" the original by adding stuff just for the sake (it seems) of "making their mark".
Outside of music it just reminds me of the terrible changes to the original Star Wars trilogy (can we get the originals, Disney, PLEASE?).
If you really feel like you need a different version, do it. Just don't hide, destroy, delete and otherwise eliminate the original.
I assume they are mostly referring to the video and not the audio. Some old music videos only have a 480p option. If you could find the source material and re-render it in 1080p or better and then add those resolution options without even swapping out the pre-existing resolutions I think that would be great.
That's 100% what this is. The company is going back to the video masters and remastering at higher quality levels than was done back in the day. The old master videos are of high quality but were only mastered to a certain quality level for release back in the day because of the state of consumer technology (size and quality of TV screens essentially). This is just going back to the original video masters and remastering for the current state of the art in consumer technology.
The edited masters were all 4:3 SD, at least until the early 2000s when HD became prevalent, and were all mastered to the highest levels of quality available at the time. To truly re-master to higher quality would involve telecine/scanning of the film, if shot on film, and completely re-editing and this is unlikely at best.
Perhaps they are re-sampling, upscaling, enhancing color and filtering to get rid of NTSC color artefacts, etc., contained in the original edited masters but they are almost certainly not re-mastering using the original sources or even submasters (such as might be done when re-mastering audio from the original multitrack master).
Here is the remastered Petty Free Fallin' and although it is presented at 1080 it is still 4:3 aspect and is clearly not at HD resolution; it looks very soft by today's standards.
One thing I really hope they don't do is altering the aspect ratio of the restored music videos. By altering the aspect ratio of the video, you are also messing with the cinematography of the video and putting your own "spin" on it.
To make things even worse, sometimes companies will even crop 4:3 footage to be 16:9, resulting in less things being visible than in the original.
Thankfully judging by the videos linked in the blog (at least the ones I've looked at), they've left the restored videos in 4:3.
For a good idea of how bad things can get when a company doing restoration messes with aspect ratios, this video highlights the bad restoration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
Hmm I see your point with Star Wars, but I don't think this is what's happening here. I see no indication that anything has changed other than upgraded quality of older classics, which seems like a good thing.
I don't agree with your Star Wars point. Regardless of how I feel about it, George Lucas made the changes to his film. I believe that is his right as creator. Making changes to other people's work crosses a line for me.
Disney owns them know, all of it, all the intellectual rights. Plus it was a team effort and from what I've read much of the best aspects of Star Wars can be traced to people other than George Lucas.
This drives me crazy, especially on Spotify. I've been uploading some of my collection to Google Play Music to get around this, but I'm probably switching to Plex in the near future.
For an extreme example of this, check out Blind Guardian on Spotify and compare some of the songs to the versions on YouTube. Some of them don't even sound like the same song.
Google Play Music is awesome, but beware that they'll do weird merging and drop/replace albums associated with the music you upload, especially if the title is fairly generic, or is semi-niche.
If anyone is looking for a decent self streaming system, Ampache[1] is a great option. Stream all of your music for free, and has the option for a Subsonic backend making it compatible with lots of clients.
Universal Music Group is one of the most regressive and antisocial media organizations in our country. Please only consume their content with adblock or via piracy - any funds you give them will fuel their lobbyists work to make our nation's IP laws even more draconian.
There are more convenient and ethical ways to consume music than theft. Don't lie to yourself about what you're doing by pretending you're on some moral high ground for stealing music. Funds going to Universal filter through to musicians and artists as royalties and fund artist advances, recording and mastering costs, thousands of employee and contractor salaries, and so much more than just lobbyists.
Music piracy is not theft. It deprives the owner of nothing. Please don't parrot music lobbyist propaganda here. I would download a car.
Supply has exploded exponentially. Music is never going to be as profitable as it was previously (and it wasn't very profitable previously). Their lack of a modern business model is not a valid reason to rent-seek the poor if they want to participate in culture.
Music looks poised to be as profitable as it was previously, possibly more so for the labels. Whether or not artists see that money is a different question.
The music industry is doing pretty decently. Streaming revenues are significant and industry revenue has been growing for years.
I'm more inclined to think that streaming revenue will plateau around ~$10-13B. It makes sense that demand for streaming is a bit more than demand for CDs, because it allows cheaper monetization of the long tail and recurring revenue. However, I'd be surprised if the industry ever pushes over that $21.5B inflation-adjusted peak again though.
Rent-seeking music labels have done a good job determining the maximum amount that consumers are willing to pay for music. Now we as consumers should make an effort to ensure the maximum percentage of revenue reaches artist. UMG siphoning 85% of revenue is abhorrent.
Music piracy is theft, period. Don't lie to yourself. Bloviate over it however you want, but in the end, you're stealing from musicians.
It's one thing to steal and acknowledge it, but it's a completely different thing to steal and pretend as if you're doing the world a favor and standing up for disadvantaged people. You stealing music helps you and only you at the expense of others. You're cheapening legitimate anti-capitalist rhetoric by abusing it for such a self-important and intellectually void purpose.
Bob Dylan got started playing covers of songs written by other people. Back then most artists did. "If only he had a shark in a suit preventing people from listening to his music, imagine how great he could have been if he only had more capital" \s.
The equivalence between cultural content sharing and theft was manufactured by the intellectual property lobby in recent history.
None of moral reasons for prohibiting theft apply to intellectual property. The marginal cost of production is zero. Society is poorer for enabling the greedy to charge admission for access to culture and information.
You're free to make your own calculus, but it seems that your opinion is in the minority here.
I believe in situational ethics. If someone steals, and you can avoid paying them, why pay someone who would steal from you?
Let's not pretend that using lobbyists to buy politicians to curtail freedom is less than stealing. It's actively participating in the undermining of democracy.
Rent seeking institutions should be taken down via any peaceful means available.
- "some of the most important works in the history"
- "exclusively on YouTube"
- Tom Petty’s music video for “Free Fallin’” released 30 years ago
Yup. Unless you have a license from Universal, you won't be able to host/download/reproduce/show the original version for another 68 years. You won't be able to do the same with the remastered version for possibly much longer time.
Welcome to "most important works in history carefully protected by corporate shills"
I wonder if AI is capable to be used to do a restoration of things like music videos, concerts, and old broadcasts. I remember seeing a video about how AI is used in video games to render photo realistic backgrounds.
I think that one day this will totally be possible. Can you imagine, with the help of future technology and algorithms, watching film from the 1940s (Gone with the Wind) that looks just as sharp and real as a modern day movie in 4k? Or even, seeing a concert (Michael Jackson) from the 80s that looks so clear that you can really feel what its like to be there?
I can imagine it because I lived it. Film is equivalent to 5k uncompressed. The shit we get today is awful in comparison (most egregious recent example being the dark scenes in the last Winterfall battle).
"Re-mastering" is tricky shit. There was once a 45rpm single that was not terribly well recorded or mixed ... but in which the teenaged lead singer's vocal very much captured the vulnerability of the character. This version became a US#1 hit.
I can't prove it, but in the decades that followed, this vocal was replaced. The vocalist and backing may have been the same (??) but the vulnerability was gone. The original version became unavailable in any format (except originals).
Same music?? hardly. Many 'B' sides became hits -solely- because of the qualities of the performance. (Example: 'Louie Louie'.) So, it all hangs on who does the re-mastering ... and whether the mastertape survived.
105 comments
[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] thread[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BinWA0EenDY
Perhaps it's just the fallibility of my own memory, but looking at the No Doubt and Beastie Boys videos linked I don't recall them looking terribly different to what they do now.
It'd be great to have a side by side comparison, or perhaps some information on which ones they're going to work on so I can grab them now and do it myself later.
Often times, even professionals working with older, standard-definition video end up processing it incorrectly, or may be working with digitizations in which someone else already made an error. Interlacing is almost never handled by a "double framerate" method (in which a 30fps interlaced video, each frame consisting of two 60Hz fields, is transformed into a 60fps progressive video). As well, often times such video is even captured with every other field missing (more common in VHS captures than professionally-handled captures, but that's a slight digression).
Also, SD video really does look best on an SD CRT display. Often times, the upscaling to HD, as well as the differing visual properties of typical HD displays, will cause the inherent flaws of the SD material to be more pronounced. You won't ever get a true comparison without seeing the video playing on a decent SDTV. And honestly, playing these videos on an SDTV would probably look amazing compared to what you would have seen on MTV in the 80s and 90s.
As it goes for new digital transfers from 16mm or 35mm sources, it's a case by case thing to me, if the production looks "cheaper" when, it was not intended to by consumed beyond SD quality, better don't go over 720p remasters or it might look weird.
The new version can't compete with new content in 4k of course, but it is much better than the previous official copy.
Seriously, couldn't we do it using deep learning?
Regardless of the techniques one might use to remaster it, you always want to start the remastering process with the best-possible source material.
Also, I hope that they adopt flac. Right now they seem to use lossy codecs.
Furthermore, you underestimate the amount of bandwidth savings when you multiply it over millions of viewings. It really adds up. It totally makes sense for them to use Opus. They save money, and the viewer loses nothing. Shaving pennies is an effective way for a business to cut expenses. Thousands of small changes, insignificant by themselves, can have a significant impact on EBITDA.
(i.e. Youtube)
The people who really care could turn it on (perhaps at the account level), and they'd be happy, and YouTube still saves on bandwidth costs.
Having good quality music videos playable on my own media server is something what I've been wanting for at least 15 years.
The excessive compression YT applies, only they can fix. It especially annoys me they take a SD definition source to mean "well surely the uploader doesn't care about the quality of this video, so lets apply the lowest quality setting to it". If you have a high quality but low resolution video you have to upsample it before uploading to get around this. But of course most SD videos on there didn't do this.
How can you download something in opus using youtube-dl? I mean downloading it in opus, not telling youtube-dl to download it in some other format and then convert it to opus. I've tried it on some of the videos and before reencoding, the audio was in vorbis which is a great format and at high bitrates not very distinguishable from opus, but still opus is better.
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md...
(Use `youtube-dl -F <url>` to see all available formats.)
EDIT to add: the above downloads only the audio, FWIW.
I've checked one of the remastered videos, and not seen any better audio option.
Since you're already using automator, you should be able to add the "run an applescript" action to add the file to itunes
From https://dougscripts.com/itunes/itinfo/info03.php:
open
Use this command to add a file to a Master Library ("Music", "Audiobooks", and so on, depending on the kind of track) and start play. Requires the alias of the file to open, which suggests you might want to use the AppleScript "choose file" command.
So really, there's nothing to fix. Notice that the text keyed on top of the still is at full resolution.
I don't know the production history of the music video industry, but The Killers and Lady Gaga are from an era (early 2000s) that could have been shot digitally.
It's not uncommon for us to deliver 1080p compressed masters (at the labels request) despite having shot and finished in 4K or even 6K.
Typically delivery specs to the label are 1080p ProRes 422HQ or DNxHD175 and an a 20mbps h.264 web "master."
Unfortunately, youtube's compression kills things that are even uploaded with enormous master quality files. I recently did a video for a major artist that was shot primarily on 35mm film (some bits were 16mm and 3.2K Alexa) but the uploaded versions look terrible despite coming from high quality files. This is due in part to the subdued, low contrast color palette and heavy grain we went with - both of which are problematic for youtubes codecs which seem to be optimized for high contrast, rich color, grain less video. In this case, even though we have gorgeous masters now - the version on YouTube is a far cry from what we've screened in theaters, festivals, and on television. And this is after conference calls with Vevo and YouTube engineers who end up just apologizing and unable to do anything about it. Frustrating.
Of course this true to some extent for every video we upload, but some are much worse than others. Vimeo does not really have this problem (or not nearly as much) for what it's worth.
See for example the highest quality available version of Stan Bush - The Touch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZKpByV5764
Versus the "HD Restoration" using footage from the Blu-Ray rip of the Transformers Movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A52--FKUQgU
Unfortunately, you lose the actual performer in the restoration.
Well he’s still present, except relegated to the bottom right corner. But I see what you mean.
The first difference you can notice is that the old version sounds kinda metallic, while the new one actually contains details.
The second difference, opening it in audacity, is that there is a slight time offset between the two versions of about 500 ms, the remastered version being "later". This of course has implications to old links that point to parts of the music video at specific offsets and in other music videos the offset could be larger.
After I've manually synced the file, and normalized both waveforms, I've made some screenshots of the waveform and fft at around 7 or 8 seconds covering the 5-6 second long part where he sings "I could lie to myself but it's true" [4]. The stereo channels of the new version are above while the old version's channels are below. You can notice that they have reversed some effects of the loudness war here: the old sample has far more dnymic compression than the new one. In the FFT plot you can see much more detail, especially in frequencies above 2kHz.
Except for the offsets, they've done a great job!
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_RKO5ozLVo
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190402133747/https://www.youtu...
[3]: https://web.archive.org/web/20110930072812oe_/http://o-o.pre...
[4]: https://imgur.com/a/rsmb49r
So much emotion in most of the comments. Love it, hate it... but not much info.
Looks like the video was filmed originally. Wonder if any more quality could be squeezed out of it, the 1920 res vesion does have additional details but not a ton. This is much better than the average old video on yt, however.
I like how the new version is attached to the original database entry for the video: it still has a 2009 upload date, 65M views, and user comments, etc.
Yada yada, yes copyright should have sane term limits, and yes maybe copyright is a weird idea to begin with, but that's not the issue here.
Fair use is essential to allowing open debate in our country, and Youtube is negligent in creating a system which does not allow for legally exempted fair uses.
https://www.youtube.com/yt/about/copyright/fair-use/#yt-copy...
https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
If they want to collect any revenues YouTube should force them to sue individual creators in the courts. Unfortunately YouTube is rewarding the bad behavior of one of their biggest clients instead.
What if your video contains two fragments, owned by different people? And what if one of those people is you or a friend?
Björk - All is Full of Love
Made in 1999 :-O
Stop. Please for the love of all that's good in the world, just STOP.
"Remastered" would be fine if it was just cleaning up the sound and improve the quality but it's not. So many are worse versions of the originals because someone decided to "improve" the original by adding stuff just for the sake (it seems) of "making their mark".
Outside of music it just reminds me of the terrible changes to the original Star Wars trilogy (can we get the originals, Disney, PLEASE?).
If you really feel like you need a different version, do it. Just don't hide, destroy, delete and otherwise eliminate the original.
Perhaps they are re-sampling, upscaling, enhancing color and filtering to get rid of NTSC color artefacts, etc., contained in the original edited masters but they are almost certainly not re-mastering using the original sources or even submasters (such as might be done when re-mastering audio from the original multitrack master).
Here is the remastered Petty Free Fallin' and although it is presented at 1080 it is still 4:3 aspect and is clearly not at HD resolution; it looks very soft by today's standards.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lWJXDG2i0A
To make things even worse, sometimes companies will even crop 4:3 footage to be 16:9, resulting in less things being visible than in the original.
Thankfully judging by the videos linked in the blog (at least the ones I've looked at), they've left the restored videos in 4:3.
For a good idea of how bad things can get when a company doing restoration messes with aspect ratios, this video highlights the bad restoration of Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZWNGq70Oyo
I learnt a while back that George Lucas allegedly did those edits to prevent his wife from earning her royalties as editor: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/7g5gfr/til_m...
For an extreme example of this, check out Blind Guardian on Spotify and compare some of the songs to the versions on YouTube. Some of them don't even sound like the same song.
Great option, however.
[1] http://ampache.org/
I'm having trouble identifying the differences.
Supply has exploded exponentially. Music is never going to be as profitable as it was previously (and it wasn't very profitable previously). Their lack of a modern business model is not a valid reason to rent-seek the poor if they want to participate in culture.
The music industry is doing pretty decently. Streaming revenues are significant and industry revenue has been growing for years.
https://pitchfork.com/features/article/the-record-industry-e...
For the artists themselves, live touring looks to be their most reliable way to make money.
I'm more inclined to think that streaming revenue will plateau around ~$10-13B. It makes sense that demand for streaming is a bit more than demand for CDs, because it allows cheaper monetization of the long tail and recurring revenue. However, I'd be surprised if the industry ever pushes over that $21.5B inflation-adjusted peak again though.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/music-industry-sales/
Rent-seeking music labels have done a good job determining the maximum amount that consumers are willing to pay for music. Now we as consumers should make an effort to ensure the maximum percentage of revenue reaches artist. UMG siphoning 85% of revenue is abhorrent.
The right to determine the terms by which their product is distributed.
When you want something, and you don’t want to pay for it.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jrwjiO1MCVs
It's one thing to steal and acknowledge it, but it's a completely different thing to steal and pretend as if you're doing the world a favor and standing up for disadvantaged people. You stealing music helps you and only you at the expense of others. You're cheapening legitimate anti-capitalist rhetoric by abusing it for such a self-important and intellectually void purpose.
The equivalence between cultural content sharing and theft was manufactured by the intellectual property lobby in recent history.
None of moral reasons for prohibiting theft apply to intellectual property. The marginal cost of production is zero. Society is poorer for enabling the greedy to charge admission for access to culture and information.
You're free to make your own calculus, but it seems that your opinion is in the minority here.
What is your definition of 'music theft' that is distinct from sharing music?
I believe in situational ethics. If someone steals, and you can avoid paying them, why pay someone who would steal from you?
Let's not pretend that using lobbyists to buy politicians to curtail freedom is less than stealing. It's actively participating in the undermining of democracy.
Rent seeking institutions should be taken down via any peaceful means available.
- "exclusively on YouTube"
- Tom Petty’s music video for “Free Fallin’” released 30 years ago
Yup. Unless you have a license from Universal, you won't be able to host/download/reproduce/show the original version for another 68 years. You won't be able to do the same with the remastered version for possibly much longer time.
Welcome to "most important works in history carefully protected by corporate shills"
It may be this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9OofzEMBAk
I think that one day this will totally be possible. Can you imagine, with the help of future technology and algorithms, watching film from the 1940s (Gone with the Wind) that looks just as sharp and real as a modern day movie in 4k? Or even, seeing a concert (Michael Jackson) from the 80s that looks so clear that you can really feel what its like to be there?
I can't prove it, but in the decades that followed, this vocal was replaced. The vocalist and backing may have been the same (??) but the vulnerability was gone. The original version became unavailable in any format (except originals).
Same music?? hardly. Many 'B' sides became hits -solely- because of the qualities of the performance. (Example: 'Louie Louie'.) So, it all hangs on who does the re-mastering ... and whether the mastertape survived.